Apple’s App Store is a nice venue to discover iOS software, but it’s far from perfect – especially when browsing its virtual shelves on your device. The iTunes Preview site – as well as other web and smartphone tools like AppShopper – all help find that needle in a haystack, but they also impose annoying limitations.

Not surprisingly, Google and Microsoft wouldn’t drill through their index in order to create a dedicated search page for mobile warez so Yahoo! took it upon themselves to fill the void (after all, they don’t have a mobile platform of their own to protect). Today, Yahoo! unveiled new search tools that help seek apps for your iOS device easier than ever before. The initiative consists of a dedicated search engine called Yahoo! App Search and an iOS app dubbed Yahoo! AppSpot.

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Those search services comb through standard app descriptors, but also introduce personalized recommendations, rich categories to narrow down that search query, as well as user reviews on the web, ratings and so forth. Yahoo! is also indexing Android apps and plans on adding other content stores in the future, including tablet apps for iPad, web apps for Facebook, Twitter and other services.

They might also widen the scope to include mobile application stores from Research in Motion, Samsung and Nokia. Check out a pair of AppSpot screenshots and the accompanying iTunes description below.